Exploding Patio Sets?
OK, not really… but now that I have your attention, let me tell you what happened this past weekend. It was Saturday, a relatively warm, cloudy day here in New Jersey. Like every Saturday for the past few months, my routine was the same, I would go out on my back deck, enjoy a cup of coffee and my morning cigarette (yes, I know… don’t go there), the dogs run around the yard, and then I get ready and head off to the gym. So like every other Saturday morning, I knew exactly what the condition of the yard was (mostly I note whether I will be mowing or doing yard work that day). Nothing was particularly amiss or out of the usual.
As I was coming home, TheWife calls me and says the our patio set is “broken” (I really must speak to her about her ability to understate a situation). I arrived home to find that the tempered glass top of our patio set had shattered into nothing but a chards of glass. I mean tiny. The pieces were so small that you could fit two or three of them on a dime. I found this quite baffling. Now granted tempered glass is supposed to break in a way that prevents thos huge sharp edges from forming, but in the past, I had only seen the tiny pieces at point of impact when something broke the glass, and the rest sort of hung together in a “sheet” of broken pieces. In this case the entire tabletop was completely in chards. I did my best Gil Grissom imitation (other than taking photos… dammit), looking for a cause. There were no rocks, sticks, branches from a tree or other projectiles within the rubble. The ring that protects the center hold where the umbrella goes had fallen straight down and landed on the leg of the table, so obviously the table came straight down, and not at some angle. There was no blood to indicate that a squirrel or other animal had landed on it crashing through. I even entertained the notion that since I live in the flight path of Newark Liberty International Airport that it was a case of “blue ice” and that in the midday sun, it had just melted… but even that would have left some sort of residue from the dye (and or contained waste…ewww). No, nothing seemed to fit.
The table, was one I had purchased from K-Mart a couple of years ago, one of their Martha Stewart line of tables. I was talking about it this week to somebody, and decided to look up some information on Tempered Glass, and at first found this article discussing how when tempered glass is compromised in some way that it can seem like it just “explodes.” Back into Google for a search of “Tempered Glass Exploding” and there… the first article up (at least at the time I did the search), was this little piece called, “Sounds of Summer: Martha Stewart Tables Shattering.” Turns out, this “phenomenon” that had struck our table was not at all uncommon.
There is apparently even a class action lawsuit that is in the works against Martha Stewart Living Omnipedia and JRA Funiture. However, JRA Funiture filed Chapter 7 Bakruptcy (total liquidation) last year, so at least they are no longer the source (depending on inventories of course) of the tables, but it also means no recovery for the Class Action Lawsuit either.
I’d like to think that with JRA Funiture out of business that this is the end of the situation, but to be honest, reading how Sears (and/or Kmart) and Martha Stewart Living have not even (so far as I can tell) acknowledged this as a problem, outside of saying they will work with consumers under warranty, leaves me a little ill at ease with them, leaving me doubting whether I want to trust them again. Problem is, at least the old sets were also farmed out under different names to other chains as well. JRA’s funiture was also sold under the Hampton Bay name at Home Depot, as well as being carried by Sam’s Club, Target and Safeway. (Only Home Depot has has a similar report of an exploding table that I have been able to find so far).
If you have (or had) one of these sets, if your table is still under warranty you can call K-mart Customer Service about it at 866-562-7848 (though K-Mart has not specifically said they will honor the manufacturer’s warranty) or Home Depot (who will honor the warranty) at 800-585-9969. Other than that you are probably out of luck. So what does this all mean? I guess, most of all be careful if you are going to buy a glass top patio set from a discount retailer. In my case, I am thinking a nice teak set might be in our future instead of risking it with glass again.
Teaching her too well?
I could have sworn, I had talked about this before, but for the life of me, cannot find it in my archives. Oh, well… to summarize quickly… One thing we did very early with LatteGirl is start her on an allowance.
Now, to cover a couple of issues, I always see when the issue of allowance comes up. We GIVE her an allowance. We do not tie it to chores. Why? Because simply put, we do not provide her an “option” of whether or not she does the chores we ask of her. There is no, conversation like, “well if you don’t clean up your room, your not going to get your allowance.” which eventually (at least once) leads to the reply of “fine, keep you money” No. This is not acceptable, and hence we don’t connect them in such a way.
Now for those that argue, “Why should I pay them for breathing?” I can give you some other ways to look at it. First of course you can look at it as paying on installment the eventual therapy bills they will have as adults, and just consider this sort of a payment plan or savings account towards that. More seriously though, stop looking as it as paying them. Think of it in how much it can possibly save you. You are going to spend money on your kids anyway. This allows an easy to understand cap on some types of spending, as well as provides a way to teach financial responsibility.
We give LatteGirl $1 per week for every year. On other words she is 7 now, so she gets $7 per week, but after the end of the month when she turns 8 she will get a “cost of living” increase. With that money we have set up 3 banks for her and (approximately) a third goes in each. So right now, $2.50 goes towards her college fund (and gets put into her 529 plan every other month), $2.50 goes into her “saving up” fund. These are for larger toy purchases she wishes to make outside of what she gets for her birthday or Xmas. The final $2.50 is for her “instant gratification” fund that she can spend (almost) any way she wants. She wants to buy gum, a candy bar or to get something from the Ice Cream Man rather than the ice cream in the freezer? It all comes out of her money. She learns to balance the “I want” against, “is it worth it?” Yes, she has made a mistake or two along the way (but who hasn’t… I still make them), but by and large, these lessons have really seemed to sunk in.
Which brings me back to why I started this post. Perhaps, she is learning a bit too quickly (for me anyway). I have gone out of my way to avoid certain toys. Some are hard and fast rules that we do not allow (i.e. Bratz) but others are things that I am just sort of trying to stall on. One of those items is a Nintendo DS Lite. She has enjoyed the LeapFrog Leapster, and I get the bonus of not only is it entertaining her, but she is also learning something while she is playing it.
However, lately I noticed she has been a bit more frugal than usual (her only real expense this year was that she finally decided to get her ears pierced… but that is another post), and saving some of her “now” money with her long term. Upon inquiry I was informed that since Santa didn’t come across with the DS, and she already knows she is not getting one for her birthday (her request was for another addition to her American Girl Doll collection), that she was now saving to get one herself. Between her allowance and a few dollars she got slipped to her from my mother (Aany money she gets in the manner gets split between her 529 Plan and her “long term” saving fund. Yes, we have this covered as well), but between her sources, she is already better than half way to her goal. And of course, she was quick to point out, that since it is her money, she is entitled to do with it as she pleases since it does not break the “Bratz Rule.”
I am going to have to add an ammendment to these rules and find a way to give myself more veto power. She is learning her way around these issues far quicker and easier than I ever imagined. I never thought I would regret teaching her money management, but while I am thrilled that she has taken to learning this so well, I can see this coming back to bite me.
I think I am
Ideas that were better on the drawing board
Pants in a Pinch - a pair of pants that is vacuumed into a disc the size of your palm that is actually a pair of pants for your 3 to 36 month old child (up to 6T supposedly available by special order). I get the idea that these are “In case of Emergency” pants, but at $20 pair I am not so sure how great a deal it is. I mean how many people travel with a small child, and don’t have some sort of backup apparel in a bag, the trunk of the car, etc where you can stash something for these types of situations? And I guess whether you used them or not, you would have to keep buying a new size as you go along, as with the rest of the clothes, but then what do you do with the old one? Pass it along? Maybe I am being too hard on them, but it just doesn’t seem to make a heck of a lot of sense to me.
BabyPlays - I heard this described as the “Netflix of Baby Toys.” I dunno, to me this sounds like an idea that would have (and perhaps should have) come (and more importantly GONE) during the dotBomb era of bad business plans. Let you child play with toys that come in the mail, play with them, then send them back and get new toys. Oh sure, at a marketing meeting this sounds great, it is a great pitch story. Keeps parents from having too many toys around the house, and reduces clutter, of toys that have a limited life in a child’s world. Marketing. But it starts to fall apart in practice as I see it, especially with infant and small child toys where you would think this makes the most sense.
Toys from small kids are generally soft and contain lots of foam. It doesn’t take much to immediately think about every child that has drooled, chewed and spit up on that toy before it arrives in your mailbox. Of course the company says that they sanitize the toys, but how becomes the big issue. Too little santizing, the surface is clean but everything that is caught in the foam remains behind only to be reconstituted when your child’s wet drooling mouth comes in contact with it. Too much santizing and the foam breaks down, and the toy rendered less that appealing. $36/month gets you 4 toys per month (and plans go up from there). I don’t know about you, but with a minimum plan of 3 months or $108 total, I can get an awful lot of toys (especially baby toys) for that price. Again, I guess there is a market of some sort for this type of service, but the thought of rental toys just doesn’t work for me.
Scan-It Operation Checkpoint Toy XRay
Photobucket Faux Pas - The photo sharing site Photobucket ran into a heap of trouble with users, when they deleted pictures of diaper clad babies by Good Mama Diapers, as claimed it was because the pictures depicted ‘nudity’ They have since, backed down and admitted it was their mistake.
Seen a dumb product (or an awesome one) that you think should be highlighted on TechParent (look for the new separate blog coming soon), e-mail it to me at jaymonster at the gmail dot com.
Un-Imbalanced
I usually laugh at parents that post about the mythical beast of “balance” between work and home. I do this usually because it seems like the search is for the one “right” answer, and anybody who has been playing this high wire act long enough knows… there is no one right answer, nor is it even really a constant. It changes as life changes.
I have basically considered myself pretty lucky. I have for the most part been able to find a situation that has worked well for me. Sure, I have passed over a few promotions and positions that would have paid more, but required extensive travel. But the reality is that I have had that luxury. I have still managed to make a good enough living, and still managed to be around for LatteGirl. Have a missed some things or am I around as much as I would like to be? Of course not, but I have found a place that works for me.
Well, I did. But now that is being challenged. I got an offer that is too good to refuse. There is some risk involved (minimal) but high reward potential. But it means longer hours, more travel, and a whole lot more stress. Oh sure I guess I could quit and look for something else, but there is no guarantee that this would provide me with any more flexibility. I can almost certainly make as much if not more money if I start to commute into Manhattan again. But, even when I was managing to find the time to be home, I was so wiped out, that I might as well not have been home at all.
So, what is my point? I guess a big mea culpa. That even if you accept that “balance” is whatever you can do, there are going to be times, that you will still feel off balance. That even if you know the beast if only a myth, you will still at times find yourself struggling to find him.
Food Battle
Since more than 50% of people are against animal cloning according to a study done by the International Food Information Council, I am confident that I am not alone when I say how disappointed I am at the FDA approving cloned animals to be used in our food supply. What bothers me more than that, is that the companies that lobbied the FDA to get this through, are aware (as I am sure the FDA is as well) at the negative response, and because of this have gone through the effort to hide it by refusing to require food derived from cloned animals to be marked as such. Sort of a Don’t Ask Don’t Tell for Clones.
This of course leads to the potential for labels from those that do not use cloned animals to mark their products as such. But let us look for a second at an issue that I have mentioned here before, the use of synthetic hormones in milk. Dairies that have chosen to not use Monsanto’s rBGH/rBST should under the same theory be “free” to let consumers know that they produce a product that does not use these hormones, giving consumers that would rather not use them a choice. Simple enough, right? Wrong! Monsanto tried the court route, with mixed results, certainly not good enough for them. Suddenly now there appears to be a genuine campaign to get these labels removed, so that consumers will not be allowed to chose for themselves.
Is this what the FDA means by “free to label or mark their products?” The simple fact is, that they assume an uneducated consumer is the best consumer, because that means more profits at the expense of your health… not that you would know it, because the FDA… who is supposed to be watching out for the best interest of the people, are all too quickly giving in to pressure from politics and big business.
It is coming to a point, where regardless of how careful you are or try to be with what you feed your family, these corporations have the money to take away your right to know what it is that you are eating. If this all sounds “anti-business” it isn’t. It is about anti-corrupt-businesses. Businesses like Monsanto that have no ethics and cheat and lie to the public and try to buy off politicians. Heck, I have all the respect in the world for companies like Burger King. Are they selling products that are, well questionable in nutritional value and awful in regards to fat? Of course. And they make no bones about it. They tell you simply the way it is. We cater to fat people with big appetites. Sure, a bacon cheeseburger is loaded with fat. But if you are a big person, with a big appetite, and want something that has 5 layers of cheese, burger and bacon, and want to consume all that fat in one sitting, then we are happy to serve you. It is not healthy. It is not smart. But they aren’t trying to get lawmakers to ban health food stores for “misleading customers by claiming that their tofu is a better choice” as their defense. It is disgusting… but it is honest. You want to eat that… you know what you are getting and are making a choice.
Unfortunately, when it comes to cloning (and unless we can stop it soon milk as well), you can’t make such a choice.
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